Quote:
Originally Posted by Migs
Science is skepticism & skepticism is science.
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pardon my French, but you don't know jack shit about science.
With your extreme obstinacy, you are not being a skeptic. Rather,
you are clinging to an a priori conviction, which is the complete opposite of what constitutes scientific skepticism.
Allow me to repeat an earlier post. I know a thing or two about the scientific method.
The entire enterprise of scientific inquiry is underpinned by skepticism. The bar for rejecting the null hypotheses (status quo, that is, no relationship, no trend, or what have you) in favor of concluding the alternative hypothesis (that there is a difference, a trend, etc.) is very rigorous, and reported in terms of confidence intervals arranged around a probability, balancing the tradeoff between committing a type-1 error (false positive; falsely concluding Ha when Ho is true; e.g., a pregnancy test that indicates you are pregnant when you are not) and a type-II error (false negative: falsely concluding Ho when Ha is true; e.g., a pregnancy test indicates you are not pregnant when in fact you are). Which is the more serious error?
For example, in say, psychology, the convention is that a valid result would be considered accurate 19 times out of 20, within a certain +/- deviation about the result (that is, type 1 error). This means that, factoring in chance variation, the same conclusion should be reached 95% of the time, under the same/similar circumstances. One can easily set the bar higher (e.g., with a larger sample size, or with more data observations), say to 99%, 99.9%, 99.9997% (i.e., six sigma level of confidence, which means
incorrectly concluding the alternative hypothesis 3.4 times out of a million). Medical trials will often set a 99.9% probability of a type-1 error.
A critical aspect of theory testing is test-retest, under similar and different circumstances (boundary conditions, assumptions), often testing against competing theories (alternative explanations for phenomena). No single study could ever have the final word, neither could any ten or any hundred.
The corpus of research on climate change consists of
many tens of thousands of studies on similar and widely different phenomena; the resulting body of evidence being very, very strongly in support of anthropogenic global warming.
This is not negotiable.